Boeun Kim's project “Mourning Heat” receives award

Boeun Kim is enrolled in the Master's program in Digital Media and has now been selected as the 34th art prize winner of the Johannis Freemason Lodge “Zum silbernen Schlüssel” Foundation. The prize, worth €5,000, is aimed at graduates, master's students, and master students of the HfK Department of Art and Design, and honors artistic works that reflect socially relevant, social, or humanitarian issues. The following applicants also received honorable mentions: Yuliya Tsviatkova, Jana Kristin Thiel, Leon Butt, and Jannes Schmidt.

Boeun Kim receives the award for her performative installation “Mourning Heat,” which will be on display at the award ceremony on January 29, 2026, at 7 p.m. at the Bremen Logenhaus, Kurfürstenallee 15. “In this project, warmth becomes a sensory language that moves across bodies and memories, creating a space where memories can meet through a shared physical and emotional resonance,” says the artist. "The work has a quiet, haunting power and touched the members of the jury in very different but intense ways. The work speaks softly but sustainably and invites a contemplative encounter with one's own feelings," said the jury.

At the heart of the installation is the “mourning device,” which generates thermoacoustic vibrations created by the expansion and contraction of heated air. These vibrations are shaped and controlled by the performers as they search for their own individual “sounds of mourning,” which gradually merge into a collective resonance. Boeun Kim: “As the heat rises through ceramic pipes, the sound transforms into a communal gesture of farewell, an interweaving of many different experiences of loss within a shared field of sound and warmth.”

“Mourning Heat” reflects on how grief in today's society is increasingly being shifted or compressed into the private sphere, limiting our opportunities to collectively acknowledge the experiences of loss of others and support one another. The project responds to this circumstance by proposing a sensory and communal practice of mourning. Despite different languages, cultures, or social backgrounds, people who have experienced loss can still feel each other—through warmth, vibrations, and shared presence. The installation expands this possibility and invites participants to engage in mourning as a social practice, reconnecting with others and developing a new sense of collective empathy.

“For me,” says Boeun Kim, "artistic creation is a practice of care, a way of caring for the human, the non-human, and the fragile relationships that connect them. With Mourning Heat, I want to explore how we can care for the invisible traces left behind by others, and how grief can be reimagined not only as acceptance of absence, but as an act of maintaining connection and relationality. The work attempts to transform individual emotional experiences into a shared social sensibility and to create possibilities for new forms of connection between different people. I hope that Mourning Heat can serve as a small social platform—a space where resonance, warmth, and solidarity can be felt anew."